80 great quotes about love and romance: from Adam and Eve to chemsex

"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell"
(Joan Crawford)

Writers and filmmakers have often dealt with taboo subjects around love, even one as dark and horrible as consensual incest. Unwitting misunderstandings around incest have also been used for comic effect (as when Lorraine falls for her time-travelling son Marty in Back to the Future; or when Princess Leia kisses Luke Skywalker in Star Wars without realising he is her brother) but inter-family love is a disturbing subject. Author Ian McEwan was known as Ian Macabre for a time in the 1970s, after he wrote about love and sibling incest. He talked to The Paris Review about his 1978 novel THE CEMENT GARDEN (which was made into a film starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Andrew Robertson) saying: "Sometimes I think I’ll never quite escape my early Ian Macabre reputation. Even a reflective review by John Updike of Atonement was flagged, tabloid style, by The New Yorker as 'Lust and Disgust'"